Page 162 of Reckless

My muscles tighten as I move to the document beside it.

The tone changes almost immediately. Suddenly it’s all budgets and efficiencies. Staffing ratios, cost reductions, and language about ‘resource allocation’ and ‘operational streamlining’ that sounds harmless until you realize every dollar they’re ‘saving’ comes from the people the public document promised to protect.

Residents aren’t people anymore.

They’re expenses.

Numbers.

Problems to be managed as cheaply as possible.

I stare at the screen, reading the same paragraph twice because my brain refuses to accept what my eyes already have. “They knew,” I whisper.

Piper nods, reading my lips. ‘They always knew,’ she signs back.

The public document was never written to tell families the truth. It was written to make them feel safe enough to stop asking questions.

The internal brief is the truth.

Keep costs down, cut wherever you can, treat people like line items on a budget instead of human beings.

I look from one document to the other, my pulse pounding louder with every line.

Both came from Calloway’s committee.

The same people wrote both.

One tells grieving families exactly what they need to hear.

The other tells the people behind closed doors what they are really expected to do.

“Jesus…” The word barely makes it past my lips.

‘They’ve been lying from the beginning,’ Piper signs.

I can’t stop staring at the two documents. “Every fundraiser.” The words barely sound like my own. “Every donation. Every charity gala where people opened their wallets because they thought they were helping…” My stomach rolls. “The residents were never going to see that money.”

Piper reads my lips, but her expression doesn’t change.

It doesn’t have to.

I already know I’m right.

“Calloway cuts the funding before it ever reaches them, tells families there isn’t enough money to provide the care they were p-promised…” My voice cracks with anger. “Then he pockets the difference.”

I sit very still for a long moment, and Piper watches me the entire time, waiting, the way she always waits when she’s already worked out how bad something is and wants to see if I’ll get there on my own.

‘How bad is this?’ she signs finally, although I realize she already knows.

I look at the screen again. Three years of families, of testimony collected one careful conversation at a time, of photographs, financial records and every scrap of evidence I could gather without anyone noticing I was gathering it. None of it, not one piece of it, ever gave me the thing sitting in front of me right now—a direct, undeniable link between Calloway’s own hand and the operational language governing those homes.

‘It’s the link,’ I sign back, my hands shaking slightly, and I have to stop and steady them before I continue, ‘The direct link between Calloway and the homes. This is what we’ve been missing.’

Piper doesn’t smile.

She just lets me sit with it.

She’s always known when to give me space to catch up instead of trying to drag me there.